persimmonfrost | Who do we think we are?

I was adopted at birth. I know a little about my biological family because it was a private adoption, and my two sets of parents met. Apparently my biological mother wanted to meet the woman who would become my mother because she felt that as long as Mom was a good person I’d be okay. I have a lot of reason to be grateful to her because I was eminently okay. Due respect to the people who made me, but the folks to the left were the only parents I ever knew or wanted. I’ve had friends who badgered me about finding my biological family and while I admit to some curiosity, it was never enough to provoke me to go searching. As I like to say, ask Pandora about opening boxes.

Still, I am sometimes curious. Mom told me that my mother was a little woman; I’m not. Apparently I take after my biological father who was a big man with a lazy eye, a problem I had as a child. Years later that was just another clue that I had Native American blood, a fact confirmed by my dentist who checked my teeth and said “Yup, you’re missing the Carabelli Cusp.” I also think I have a small talon cusp on my incisors. The missing Carabelli is something peculiar to NA and Pacific island populations, and the talon is pretty strictly Native American. I have a lot of other minor traits that point to NA ancestry. So I did get to wondering what I’d find if I had my DNA analyzed.

I had the mitochondrial (mother’s) DNA test done as part of the National Genographic Project back in 2007 when it cost something like $20. What I got back was really confusing and pointed to some interesting origins — not NA, that would have come from my bio father. My haplogroup is U6a (The Cheddar Man was a U5. Interestingly enough the U6 haplogroup is not found among Native American populations,) and the origins I discovered are: Cameroon – Ouldeme, Cameroon – Podokwo, Cape Verde, England, France, Hungary, Iraq – Mizrachi, Ireland, Italy, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Poland – Ashkenazi, Portugal, Tunisia – Sephardic, Ukraine, United Kingdom. If I understand the results correctly I can also claim kinship with certain north and west Africans and three different Jewish groups, Mizrachi, Ashkenaz, and Sephardic. I find that pretty damn exciting. Am I proud? Hell yes, I’m proud. They’re distant connections but I’m thrilled to have them. And we’re travelers. Here’s a map of the frequency distribution of the U haplogroups:

Apparently my bio mother’s people are from France and Denmark.

What is this in aid of? I guess it’s about saying that family is a lot of different things. There’s the family of love and affinity, the one I had for so many years, a family of choice rather than blood, but no less strong or meaningful because of it. There’s the biological family that gives you things like the shape of your teeth and the color of your eyes. And there are greater families, genetic or just the human family that encompasses everyone who has ever lived and will ever live. Differences seem pointless when considered in light of all the generations that made each one of us.

You want to know something crazy? I look like my adoptive parents. I have similar physical ailments. And I’m the same sort of eccentric they were. You want to put some kind of mystical had-to-happen spin on that, feel free. I sometimes do. We are who we are for reasons we may never entirely understand. I find that comforting; it allows us to be so much more.